by J. M. Porup
He handed me a five-dollar bill. “Your contrition has been noted and accepted. You have twenty-four hours to leave the country.”
The men grinned at me. I cleared my throat. I said, “Permit me to inspect the bodies?”
The corporal scowled. “Make it quick.”
One by one I peeled back the blankets, the fabric sticking to charred faces. In addition to the old woman, I saw the skinless skulls of two blond-haired guys, neither of them Pitt, a Bolivian child, five broad-shouldered Argentinians wearing rugby jerseys, and two overweight white women in their fifties.
Only one body was left.
I knelt, took hold of the edge of the blanket. I held my face to the sky, felt the sun warm on my cheek. I breathed in deep, held it, fighting the nausea, and yanked back the wool covering.
A blackened, eyeless face stared up at me. Clumps of blond hair clung to the top of the skull. Burned deep into the flesh below the neck, a shark-tooth necklace.
NINETEEN
The gravel crunched underfoot. I dropped myself from one step to another, not paying attention to where I was going, so long as it was down.
Now what?
Pitt was dead. I had my soccer-mom closure. Motherfucking bullshit. Nothing was closed. Only a million unanswered questions that no longer mattered. I came all this way to find you, Pitt, and you had to go and die on me before I could hear it from your lips. Maybe then I might have believed in this touchy-feely ashram bullshit.
But Pitt was dead and his secret along with him. Ambo had tricked him into showing up—You want to talk? Sure, let’s talk!—and killed him. Plus a bunch of other innocent people. I wondered what excuse he’d give the press. Bolivian Terrorists Attack Tourist Watering Hole? Some bullshit. Did Bolivia even have terrorists? Whatever. In a week or two it would all be forgotten.
What was Pitt’s secret? It made me crazy. What did he want me to know? Or maybe this was it: death heals all wounds. There was no peace on earth and never would be. But I hoped that whatever was left of him, his consciousness—his soul, if he had one—had reached a cease-fire with existence.
But my war was just beginning. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Horse. Fuck Gaia. I owed Pitt a debt. A life for a life. For a brief moment in time I had believed that redemption was possible. Taunting me with that momentary glimpse of Eden… I imagined my hands around Ambo’s throat, squeezing the air out of him. Watching him suffer. Watching him die.
Gentlemen of the jury, the facts are simple: Ambo ordered the execution of his own son, Pitt. Had his own wife murdered. Of course he did. Why would Pitt kill his own mother? Ambo framed me for that crime.
What’s more, Ambo let me out of jail to help find Pitt. And they’d found him, although without my aid. What were Ambo’s plans for me now? The only logical answer: he would kill me. Or try to.
But what about Kate? I could go to her. Woo her. Try to build a life again.
Right…now who was kidding who? She’d said goodbye. I was pretty sure she meant it.
What if she didn’t? What if there was a chance? She still had some feelings for me, that was clear. Or why had she seduced me on the beach?
I was unsure of myself, for the first time in a long while. Even if I could persuade her to leave Victor and come back to me—by no means a likely outcome—she was a reminder of my sin. Our shared sin. I couldn’t look at her without seeing our dead child’s face. I didn’t deserve to be happy. But if she had found peace, maybe she could teach me how. Maybe we could build on that. Make some kind of life together.
We could run. Go to Brazil. Learn some Portuguese. I frowned. But too much happiness was possible in Brazil. The beach? Not for me. Sun, sand and threesomes with the golden girls of Rio? Not my style. To be so close to happiness might give me a heart attack.
More to the point, if Ambo was trying to kill me, it didn’t matter where we went. He would find us. He would kill us both. I didn’t care too much what happened to me. But I didn’t want anything to happen to Kate.
No. It was time to go back to Lima. Confront Ambo. Demand the truth. Then kill him. Kill or be killed. The law of the jungle. The law of Lima. It had come to that. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. I entered my verdict: the defendant is guilty on all charges, Your Honor.
First step was the ashram. Victor and Echo and the rest. If I could catch them before they left. They were my logical allies. Play along with their plan to stop the war—as if that was going to make any difference. I would need their help to get back down to Lima. I flexed my fingers. They itched. I got a hard-on just thinking about Ambo’s throat. No Viagra necessary.
I squeezed the air in front of me, wishing his neck was between my hands. I could almost smell his dying breath. I was so absorbed in this daydream I nearly stepped on her. My blonde bundle of joy. She looked at me, as though expecting a greeting. Her eyes were red but the tears had stopped. She’d braided her hair, two long cords of yellow down each side.
She asked, “You find your friend?”
I grunted. Stepped around her. Clomped my way down the stairs.
A timid voice said to my back, “I ask, you find your friend?”
“The fuck you care,” I said, not bothering to stop.
I heard her stand up. “Where you going?”
“Get off this island.”
“They won’t let you.”
“Got a boat,” I called over my shoulder.
“Can I come?” she asked.
I didn’t turn. “No.”
Booted feet danced on the gravel beside me. “I’m serious,” she said. “Take me with you.”
“So am I.”
She panted for breath, trying to keep up. “My name’s Aurora. I’m coming whether you want me to or not.”
I turned to confront her. She crunched to a halt on the stair above me. I said, “Fuck off already, will you?”
She slapped me across the face. Hit hard for a girl. Her thumb grazed my broken nose. I saw white. Ground my teeth together, clenched my fists. Opened my eyes. She stared at me, her face wide with fear. But she did not flinch. Did not back down. I tensed my arm to strike.
She said, “You’re not the only one who’s lost someone. Remember?”
She held up her open palms to block my blow. Maybe she was right. Damn, she was right. There was plenty of grief to go around. I lowered my fists.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you can’t come with. What I’ve got to do is dangerous.”
“And what’s that?”
I lifted my shoulders, let them drop. “Find the bastards who did this. Make them hurt. Kill them if I can.”
She pulled at her braids. Blood seeped from the roots. “You mean you know who did this?”
“Assassins for the CIA,” I said. “Call themselves the Dissent Suppression Unit.” I nodded up the hill. “They did it to keep my friend from talking.” I added, “They’re probably out there somewhere, waiting for me. To kill me. Which is why you can’t come along.”
She grabbed my arm. “I’m not asking.”
“If you come, the Americans will kill you too,” I said. “I’ve got enough dead people on my conscience already. I don’t need any more.”
“Sven and I were going to get married. Have babies. You understand? We’ve known each other since kindergarten. If I hadn’t picked a fight he’d still be alive. It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“Isn’t that a bit harsh?” I asked. “I mean, how could you have known?”
“That’s not the point!” she screamed at me. Her face turned purple. “You are such an asshole, you know that?”
I nodded. Vigorously. “Yes. I do.”
She ducked her head, frowned at her boots. Her lips puckered. “I can’t stay here. I’ve got to get off this island. And if that means I get killed, I don’t care. But I’ve got to do something. And you’re the only something I see happening around here.”
Every general needs cannon fodder, I thought. I didn’t much like the idea. I didn’t want her along
. But if I said no she’d cause a major scene, and getting off the island was going to be a lot harder than getting onto it. Plus, if she stopped a bullet somewhere between here and my hands around Ambo’s throat, I wouldn’t complain. She could be my Swedish body armor. Then maybe I’d survive long enough to see Kate again.
I said, “You get killed, it’s not my fault. Got it?”
She tugged on her braids, spoke to the ground. Spat the words like bullets. “Let’s go kill the fuckers.”
When we got back to the beach, the police did not want to let us off the island. No surprise there. Neither, for that matter, did the English girls. Two conscripts with AK-47s stood guarding the boat.
“Who’s the tart?” the Liverpudlian asked.
“My fiancée,” I growled. “Wanna make something of it?”
The girl stroked Aurora’s cheek. “She’s cute. Wanna party?”
I had to pry Aurora’s fingers from the girl’s hair.
Darting away from the amused if sluggish police contingent, we humped back up the hill, in search of a boat. We descended to the Hotel Pelicano, on the water’s edge, and, I am ashamed to say, stole their boat. Given the ruckus on the island, I was amazed there was no one guarding it. Unlike my little aluminum dinghy, this was a proper speedboat, with twin 110-horsepower engines and a computerized navigational system, which seemed like complete overkill on a land-locked lake at four thousand meters. That is, until they started shooting at us.
Gunshots splashed the water off our bow. A puff of smoke hissed upward from a gun turret; a whistling sound; and a shell exploded in the water not ten meters away, soaking us with spray, nearly swamping us.
“Grab the gun!” I shouted.
“What gun?”
“Shit!” I’d left it in the other boat.
I crouched low, opened the throttle, and we shot across the lake, bouncing off the low waves. More shells splashed around us, but the speedboat outpaced them, until the destroyer receded to a dot on the horizon.
But they wouldn’t be far behind us.
“You did this,” Victor said. He pointed the gun at my head.
Fresh bruises littered his face. Wet strands of combover hung at his shoulder. His sweater was torn down the front. The gun twitched and bobbed in his hand. He looked like a homicidal raccoon with a bad case of the DTs.
This was the man Kate preferred to me? I was no great catch. I knew that. But this was the competition? I put my hands in the air and considered my options.
Hmm. There weren’t any. I wondered what I’d say to Pitt if there really was an afterlife. What I’d say to Lili.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have flushed.”
Aurora trudged through the sand, around Victor, up the gravel rise to the main street of the tiny village. Victor’s gun wavered between my nose and her buttocks. “Come back here!” he shouted. “I’ll shoot!”
“Go ahead, for all I care,” Aurora said.
“Hey,” I said, “that’s my line.”
She rounded the corner and stopped. She swayed on her feet. Fell to her knees. “Oh my God,” she said. She covered her face with her hands. “This is real. This is happening.”
“What is?” I asked.
But all she said was, “Who could do such a thing?”
“Do what?”
“As if you have to ask,” Victor sneered. He put both hands on the gun, as though willing himself to shoot, but unable to do so.
“Before you kill me,” I said, “let me find out what I did?”
He jerked the gun, motioning me toward Aurora. I climbed the gravel embankment and joined her in a front-row seat to an oozing pile of dead bodies.
A realtor would have said the houses were ready for new occupants, as long as you didn’t mind the bullet holes in the exterior wood paneling, or the shattered glass. And hey, blood comes out with just a little elbow grease, right? But really, sorry, hey, the corpses of the previous tenants have to go. Maggoty cadavers lower property values for everyone, not just you.
Whoever had done it had not been satisfied with merely massacring everyone in sight. No. They had to stack the bodies in a pile taller than me. Blood and piss formed puddles on the hard-packed earth. Orange-and-scarlet robes mixed with denim. A toothless mouth gaped at me upside down, and I knew the old fisherman’s net would never be fully mended. The little boy, the one who’d crashed into me, he was there too, eyes missing from their sockets, Bolivia’s hopes for the World Cup now dashed. Echo’s pregnant belly sagged amidst the carnage, one less angry volunteer for the Lima office. I picked up a red baseball cap, and half an eyeball plopped onto my shoe. I dropped the cap on the ground. I wondered if Kate was buried somewhere in the mess.
“It was you,” Victor said. His breath came in snorts and gulps, his nostrils vibrating. “You. And him. Michael.” He kicked a corpse on the ground, separating it from the main pile. He flipped it over with his toe. It was the talkative monk/volunteer/freakazoid from the night before. The auto-flagellating weirdo. The back of his head was missing.
“Why would he do such a thing?” I asked.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“You know the dead guy?” Aurora asked me.
“I ate dinner with him last night. He said all of a dozen words before whipping himself with barbed wire.”
“He was CIA!” Victor raged. “Had to be. Or why did he do all this?”
“So what happened?” Aurora asked. “All of a sudden he just started shooting?”
“Pretty much.” He wiped the sweat from his palms against his sweater, one at a time, but kept the gun pointed at my chest. He said, “We were loading the boats. Preparing to flee. We expected American aggression.” He spat. “Michael had a gun.” He looked at the weapon in his hand. “This gun. Just started killing people. Clip after clip after clip. Men. Women. Children.”
I swallowed. “Kate?”
“How convenient,” he sneered. “I told you. Kate got away. A boatload left this morning, before you got up. Crossed the lake, took a jeep into the mountains.”
“And you think I had something to do with this.”
“I know you fucking did!” he shouted, his wet combover slapping against his right shoulder, his scalp pink in the late-morning sun.
“I know you did,” he said again. His lips curled inward in a face-puckering howl. His shoulders shook. The gun rattled in his hands. “And now you’ll get your fucking war.”
“Wait a second. What war?” Aurora held her palm in front of the gun barrel. “And how do you know it was this guy?” She jerked a thumb in my direction. “What was your name again?”
“Horace,” I said. “But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”
She giggled. “Really? Like cloppity-clippity-clop, ride off into the sunset?”
“More like pulling heavy loads until you lie down at the side of the road and they shoot you. But close,” I said.
Victor stepped between us, pointed the gun at her, then at me, back and forth, as though confused who to kill. “You murder dozens of innocent people, and you stand here talking about ponies?”
Aurora held up her hands again. “We had nothing to do with this. And Horse has been on the island all morning.”
“Of course he was,” Victor said. “All he did was lead them here so they could kill us all.”
“But you just said the dead guy, Michael was it? Was CIA. How long has he been here for?” she asked.
Victor’s combover trembled. “Months. Three months. Three and a half.”
“So they already knew you were here. Since ages ago. So what exactly is Horse guilty of?”
The gun trembled in his hand. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. Both of you. You’re part of it too. I can tell.” He pointed the gun at her, then at me. Aimed at my head. His eyes narrowed, like he was about to pull the trigger.
My body moved on autopilot. I smacked my fist down on the gun with one hand, slapped Victor across the face with the other. H
e let go of the gun. I picked it off the ground.
“I feel the same,” I said. He continued to convulse. I slapped him again. “It will not do you any good. You understand?”
He cringed on the ground, covered his face with his forearms, hands flat on his scalp. “Do it quick and get it over with.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I said. “We’re not going to kill you. Will you snap out of it?”
“He’s in shock,” Aurora said. “Give him some time.”
“We haven’t got time,” I said. I flicked the gun into the lake. It splashed in the water and disappeared.
“Happy now?” I asked.
He peeked between his wrists. “You’re not? Going to kill me, I mean?”
“Why would I want to kill you?” I asked him. I held out my hand. “Come on. Get up. Be a man.”
He took my hand and I heaved him to his feet. He gaped at me. Glanced over his shoulders, as though expecting an assault.
“Are there others?” I asked him. “The ones who did this?”
“No,” he said. “Just Michael.”
I looked at Aurora. She shrugged. “Other survivors, maybe?” I asked.
Victor shook his head. “No one,” he stuttered. “No one left. No one.”
“How did you survive?”
He went limp. He flopped back on the ground, arms slapping against the sand. “I was taking a shit,” he wailed. He looked up. “Too much coffee,” he added, pleading for understanding.
“I thought you drank tea,” I said.
He held out his open palms. His face contorted in sorrow. “Fifty people just got murdered and you’re worried about what I drink with breakfast?”
“So you heard gunfire,” Aurora suggested.
He twisted his limp arms in circles, a woebegone duck.
“Why didn’t the monks fight back?” I squatted next to him. “They all had guns. AK-47s, it looked like. Shotguns, too.”
“They tried.” He raked his combover back onto his scalp. It lay in thick clumps across his naked pate. “They are not warriors. They are not soldiers. Most don’t even know how to use a rifle. Never even pulled the trigger. The bullets we gave them were blanks.”
“Then what’d you give them guns for, for heaven’s sake?” Aurora said.